This Year's Blagojevich

Today, disgraced and defiant, former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich surrenders himself to a federal prison in Colorado to serve his fourteen-year sentence for political corruption. Local news programs are doing nothing but tracking his vehicle from home to airport to airport to prison. What follows is a repost from the month after his initial arrest.

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Pardon my long post, but I'm feeling a bit heady. Illinois is a heady place these days, after all: the Bears may make the playoffs, the junior U.S. senator is about to become president, and the governor is about to be impeached and imprisoned. The 2016 Olympics are a possibility here that is strengthened by our favorite son ascending to the presidency but weakened by our chief executive allegedly conducting a political crime spree.

I’m fascinated by the governor’s story. He’s been in view here far longer than President-Elect Obama, to be honest, and his own presidential aspirations have never been far below the surface. Senator John McCain, the “maverick” reformer cum failed presidential candidate, told David Letterman that Governor Blagojevich once told him that he considered himself a reformer like McCain, thanking him for being a political role model. McCain and Letterman shared a laugh over those comments, absurd as they sound alongside transcripts of foul-mouthed shakedowns from the governor’s office.

The conversation about Governor Blagojevich has shifted, at least temporarily, to the question of his mental health. People think he must have been crazy to conduct so brazen a campaign as the one to sell a senate seat and force the firing of critical journalists. The mental health community, however, is stopping short of calling the governor psychotic; instead, they’re calling him a narcissist.

Dr. Daniela Schreirer is a forensic psychologist at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology and she does not see any sign of mental illness in the public Blagojevich, but believes he does have sociopathic traits.
"We're just talking about traits. We're not talking about full-blown diagnosis. But certainly, there's the same sense of entitlement, the same sense of thinking I am superior. I can do whatever I want. I am not going to be caught," Schreirer said.

Blagojevich was, at one time, a rising star. He achieved office initially by being charming and self-deprecating; an advertising campaign consisted of everyday Illinoisans struggling to pronounce his last name but admiring his qualifications and energy. He eventually became a U.S. Representative and made a name for himself by helping to negotiate the release of three American soldiers, who were being detained in Yugoslavia under dictator Slobodan Milosevic.

Three years later he was running for governor, but the presidency was on his mind. In an ad that cemented his reputation in my mind as a twerp, he had grade-school students quiz him about American presidents: “Sixteenth president?” “Abraham Lincoln! . . .” Ostensibly about his commitment to education, the ad told me that he viewed the governorship as a stepping stone to his true destiny as president of the United States. And yet he spoke clearly, candidly and winsomely with interviewers, among other things stating with enthusiasm that he and his family “love Jesus.” This at the time was one of the most plainspoken, unambiguous comments on personal faith I'd heard from a candidate who wasn't in the pocket of the religious right. So while I didn’t vote for him (remember, I thought he was a twerp), I had hopes that his tenure as governor would be marked by policies that reflected his love for Jesus—just and compassionate programs, ethical policies and practices.

Blagojevich became governor in what might be considered the easiest campaign ever: the current Republican governor, George Ryan, was on notice that he’d be facing trial after his term ended, and the Republican candidate to replace him shared the same last name: Jim Ryan, no relation. For the second time in his career, Blagojevich’s last name carried him into office. Four years later the Illinois Republican party still couldn’t get its act together; State Treasurer Judy Baar Topinka was the only Republican holding statewide office, and when she ran against the governor on the argument that he had failed both to manage the state’s economy and to fight corruption, one video of her dancing with former Governor Ryan put an end to her chances to unseat Blagojevich. He made Elvis jokes about being “All Shook Up” over his victory and settled into his second term.

The governor’s second term has been characterized mainly by gridlock. It seems that he’s systematically alienated everyone in state government, such that the legislature and the Chicago Transit Authority, among other institutions, faced near-implosion while he sat in the bleachers enjoying hockey games. Some tried to call a constitutional convention for the express purpose of making it legal to recall his position; others spoke explicitly and frequently about his grandstanding and bullheadedness.

Barack Obama, it’s presumed, frustrated Blagojevich’s career plans by taking the national spotlight in 2004's Democratic National Convention and launching an ultimately successful presidential campaign in 2007. This was to be Blagojevich’s year, if you believe the scuttlebutt, but public and peer opinion had turned against him, so that by election day 2008 he had, among his liabilities, a federal investigation into his office and a devastatingly negative reputation among his constituents, and as almost his only asset, a recently vacated senate seat.

I feel bad for Rod Blagojevich. That’s a relatively new feeling for me; I’ve typically dismissed him as a mere worshiper of “the characteristically American bitch goddess of Success,” as Mark Stritcherz put it in America magazine. But Blagojevich is merely the most recent and most pronounced example of the pervasive streak of narcissism, with its attendant sense of entitlement and invulnerability, that runs through our culture and, I think, every human heart.

Blagojevich is, in that respect, this year’s Gary Hart, who dared reporters to follow him in their suspicions of his infidelity, and who resigned his own presidential campaign when they did exactly that and caught him in an affair. Blagojevich is this year’s Richard Nixon, who publicly told onlookers “I am not a crook” but who privately and obscenely violated the law on tape. He’s this year’s Ananias, who made a grand public gesture in donating his wealth to the early church but who was revealed to be just another poser with a wicked heart. He's this year’s Cain, who killed his brother and then stared down God with a brazen dismissal of the accusation: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” He's this year's me, and all the mes here in Me-Ville.

Stritcherz goes on to lament the Me-Ville we find ourselves in, a world effectively incapable of policing itself or aspiring to self-sacrifice toward the greater good, by describing the world we've fallen short of:

In a morally and spiritually robust society, institutions identify such characters as rascals and discipline them accordingly; they can separate the wheat from the chaff, as it were.

I paraphrase the apostle Paul: Who will rescue us from this city of death? Thanks be to God who, if we dare follow, will deliver us from Me-Ville, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen. Come Lord Jesus.

Keep Calm. Carry On. Repeat.

My friend Sean recently directed me to a video that tells the story of a British propaganda poster from the 1940s: "Keep Calm and Carry On." I liked the video so much I downloaded the app, which takes up quite a bit of space on my phone but allows me to revisit the video fairly regularly, as well as to make my own propaganda posters. Watch the video and then read on.

According to Wikipedia the poster, along with its companions "Freedom Is in Peril. Defend It with All Your Might" and "Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution Will Bring Us Victory," were intended to enliven the patriotism and civic responsibility of British citizens; an Economist article draws our attention to how it ""taps directly into the country's mythic image of itself: unshowily brave and just a little stiff, brewing tea as the bombs fall," mainly to demonstrate how little of that legendary level-headedness remains in the world today.

I like the video because it takes place in a bookstore--a used bookstore, but a bookstore nonetheless. Apparently the "Keep Calm and Carry On" poster, while earning the largest print run of the three (more than three times as many as "Your Courage" were printed), had extremely limited distribution and faded almost immediately from the cultural consciousness until a copy of the poster was found among some boxes of books sixty years later. It's out from under copyright protection now, so the bookstore reprinted it freely for its customers, and word spread, and now it's everywhere. I like that it was a bookstore owner who found it, appreciated it and made it available to her customers. I like that something in a bookstore captured so much imagination in such a short period. Given the whole range of uncertainties associated with book publishing these days, and how bent toward the future an entire industry is, I like how quaint and stubbornly British the spirit of the phrase is, and how something so antiquated can be so reassuring in our own ephemeral age. There's lots to like about this poster and the story behind it.

Still, I wonder, why now and not then? Why did it take six decades for people to embrace this message? At the height of the Blitz on Britain in World War II, as many as 150,000 people a night were taking shelter in the London Underground. That's a captive audience for propaganda, and "Keep Calm and Carry On" is pretty good messaging for citizens who are enduring a relentless air bombing campaign. In fact the result of the Blitz was a kind of collectively stiffened upper lip, a resoluteness that Germany must not win the war, that Britain must endure and overcome. And yet even as England emerged from the war victorious, the rallying cry "Keep Calm and Carry On" didn't survive it. It's almost like they wound up not needing it.

Why didn't they need it? And more to the point, why is it catching on now? By most accounts our upper lips today are nowhere near as stiff as those of our grandparents and great-grandparents, and so such appeals to our inherent ruggedness ought not work. Besides, I for one am not British; I'm American, and we're inspired by much less modest propaganda than what came out of mid-twentieth-century Britain. "Let's roll" is more our speed. We're also, by and large, far too ironic for such an easily mocked rallying cry: "Keep Calm and Carry On" in the face of persistent explosions is as absurd to our postmodern sensibilities as "The beatings will continue until morale improves." Give us plain-spoken propaganda, and we'll fold it into some kind of profane origami and throw it right back in your face.

And yet that's not what's happened. Instead of scorn and mockery, the video and the phrase have engendered, for the most part, wistfulness and even faint traces of hope. I watch this video and sigh with the realization of how wounded so many of us are, how ill-prepared we've been, over the course of the Nuclear Age, for hardship. I read this one poster and realize just how cumulative an effect that arms races and cold wars and atomic clocks and dirty bombs and terror attacks and global warming and economic meltdowns and wars and rumors of wars have had on our hope, how the steady failures of our most longstanding institutions--from governmental betrayals of their citizenry to church scandals and yellow journalism and even celebrity malfeasance--have caused us to assume the worst and to measure our own wisdom by the sophistication of our cynicism. I watch this video and realize how helpful, now and then, a plain-spoken, unself-conscious directive can be. "Keep calm," some faceless, nameless typesetter fits to a poster, "and carry on." And somehow I'm emboldened, empowered and even encouraged to do so.

I recently read J. C. Ryle's A Call to Prayer, another gift from another friend that hearkens back to another time and place. Ryle was the first bishop of Liverpool, an earthy blue-collar town that would give birth, some sixty years after Ryle and fifteen years after the war, to so definitively postmodern and endearingly cynical a troupe as the Beatles. In his day Ryle didn't sell prayer to his readers; he compelled it of them. He writes as much (if not more) of our responsibility to pray as he does of the privilege and benefits of prayer. And whereas people of my generation and nationality express our opinions in personal, tentative language of feeling--"I feel that people don't pray much"--Ryle uses creedal language to assert his convictions: "I believe there are tens of thousands whose prayers are nothing but a mere form." It's brash, it's arresting, it's anachronistic, it's . . . somehow reassuring.

I'm coming to believe that what the world needs now--or at least every now and then--is a little less feeling and a little more believing. There's something oddly fresh about plain-spokenness, directness. It's odd because it's anachronistic, or maybe it's odd because we've forgotten how empowering a stiff upper lip can be.

The Value of Light: Writing as Truth-Seeking

I happened upon this post from August 2009. I think it bears repeating, for writers and other communicators who aspire to live in, and work with, the truth.

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My day job is as an editor for a publisher of nonfiction books, and as such I try to help people frame and structure their ideas so that their reader won't nod off. Often, that's not an easy task. There are many shapes that a nonfiction book could take that readers will tolerate, but my favorite is something along the lines of this:

1. Articulate the problem.
2. Trace the history of the problem.
3. Identify the core principles that pertain to the problem.
4. Tease out the implications of the core principles.
5. Reorganize the world around those core principles and their implications.

(Of course this presumes some prior identification with the problem and some hope of a solution on the part of the reader. And so the book is packaged around the promise--an introduction and a conclusion (perhaps better thought of as a benediction) assure the reader that the ennui that led them to the book can be confronted and contended with--and sold by its solutions with a catchy, memorable, hope-filled title. Instant classic. Or something like that.)

This structure is, incidentally, how practical theologians tend to think. Practical theologians emphasize the feedback loop between the abstract work that historically has characterized theology and the world-made-by-and-sustained-by-God that inspires such abstractions. They ask questions like "Why are so many people getting tattoos? Why is the Bible seemingly so opposed to tattoos? Are the tattoos of the twenty-first centuries A.D. and B.C. the same? If not, how ought we to think about contemporary body art?"

My utter lack of body art aside, I suppose my enthusiasm for such grounded theological reflection may make me an armchair practical theologian. My patron saint in this vocation is G. K. Chesterton, who wrote the following as an introduction to his Heretics, a collection of essays playfully challenging the prevailing post-Christian minds of his day.

Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, “Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good–” At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their unmediaeval practicality. But as things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably, to-day, to-morrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.

I've referred several new authors to this parable lately, a reminder that they have in a sense embraced the call of this monk, and while they thus may be occasionally and even "somewhat excusably knocked down," clear and cogent books are their gift to a world that too often doesn't know what it wants or even needs. I daresay their books are their ministry, their mission.

To Die, It's Easy: My GoodReads Review of Maus

The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

One can hardly call oneself an expert in the genre of graphic novels without having read Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer prizewinning Maus, the story of his father's experience of the Holocaust interwoven with their own complicated contemporary relationship. I did just that, effectively, eight years ago when I wrote my book Comic Book Character (now in its second printing! Ha ha) without doing exhaustive research of the genre. I'm sorry for that, America. I'm repenting of that oversight and others during this, my Year of Overdue Books (books I should have read by this point in my lfe). Maus is doubly appropriate for the project, since I borrowed the two-volume set from a friend seven months ago when I saw it on her bookshelf while we were filming a promotional video for my booklet The Parable of the Unexpected Guest (now in its second printing!). I'm sorry for hoarding your stuff, Rachel. Thanks for your forbearance.

Maus was worth the wait and measured up to everything its broad acclaim made it out to be. How does one tell someone else's Holocaust story in a way that avoids melodrama on one end and reticence or dismissiveness on the other? How do you reawaken disgust and shame and repentance and reverence over a tragedy of the ages that has suffered the neglect and overfamiliarization of a short-memoried and shallow age? How do you convey the complexity of war-torn Poland and Germany and Hungary, or the complexity of the relationship betwen survivors and their children? It turns out that a comic book is uniquely up to the challenge. In bold strokes throughout, Spiegelman represents emotion and hardship both in the past and in the author's present. Portraying Jews as mice and Germans as cats (and French people as frogs), he aids the reader's understanding and communicates the particular tragedy: Nazis hunted, terrorized and devastated the Jews in the same ways that cats play with their prey; Jews were conspicuously Jewish in Europe for no really good reason apart from the broad anti-Semitism that made Naziism possible in the first place. The art in this book isn't pretty, but it's brilliant.

So is the writing. An Eastern European, old-world English dialect carries through the books; you never lose sight of the fact that Spiegelman is being told this story in his father Vladek's second tongue, but the language still is fluid and clear. Spiegelman's own English is unaffected, reinforcing the distance between a father who is usually hard to take and a son who has not yet come to terms with what the Holocaust cost. There's an intimacy between the two, in the sharing of this dreadful but sacred story, that gives full weight to the pain that so often settles in between father and son. The familiarity between the two belies the gravity of the topic; little glimpses of humor punctuate the tragedy and remind the reader that this really happened, that real human beings really did this thing to one another. We identify easily with Spiegelman, and we find ourselves surprised as we come to identify with Vladek. But what's most troubling, what's most powerful, is how we come to recognize ourselves in the villains. The casualness of the evil that pervades the Holocaust is evident in the casualness with which Vladek recalls the atrocities he faced, the lengths he went to in order to survive and protect his family, the steady reports of parents, siblings, cousins and children who died along the way. It's remarkable that Vladek lived through it, that he was able to tap into a seemingly limitless creativity to overcome what seems impossible to overcome. No wonder he was so frustrated by his son's seemingly cavalier approach to life, his apparent lack of ingenuity. No wonder his son was so irritated by his propensity to save meaningless things and destroy personal treasures. You can hardly imagine them understanding each other, but you feel you understand them both.

Maus is subtitled "A Survivor's Tale," which is apt. Vladek is a hero moreso than a victim, even though he and millions of others were victimized in the Holocaust. When you encounter a hero, you do well to listen for wisdom; Vladek's wisdom is summed up succinctly in volume one but embodied throughout: "To die, it's easy . . . But you have to struggle for life!"

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